You might have already seen my profile photograph by now and at least one of these thoughts might have occurred: “Where is this?”, “Is that really Sheffield?”, “How is it purple? Photoshop?”. “What the hell is he wearing?”.
Well, here are answers to three of those, and a look at the rest of the photos we took of moi.
This is one of my favourite photo shoot locations, easily accessible from Sheffield with a spectacular view over the city. It is just off Ringinglow road, past Norfolk Arms, and the Alpacas. Once you’ve parked this spot is only a five-minute walk, so I can haul a load of lighting crap with me (but we’ll get to that in a couple of answer’s time).
Yes, that’s Sheffield behind me, in case you aren’t from around here this is very dramatic setting for a major UK city. This hill is approx. 350 metres (1150 feet) higher than the city centre, despite only being around 10km or 6 miles from the city centre (this is also basically the first half of the half marathon route and explains why it’s so disgusting to run! Ask me how I know).
Okay the purple, firstly I just love purple and wanted Tempetual’s branding to be purple and gold, but how do I make the background of a photo change colour? It is not through fancy editing, this isn’t faked, it’s a mostly in-camera technique. This is to do with colour theory and specifically colour opposites. If I light myself with white light, and white balance the photo for that, the background will look normal (at night with all the modern LED streetlamps, that would be pale blue). If I was to light myself in a slightly orange light then white balance the photo for that, I would continue appearing correctly lit, while the background would swing to a really blue look. Taking this concept further, what is the colour opposite of purple? If we look at this wheel, we can see it should be a yellowy orange. So, I stacked together multiple gels on my key light’s flash head. I think it was a mix of Rogue’s Oklahoma Yellow, and Rust, maybe also a 1/4 CTO. This left the raw file looking like this:
Then applying the colour correction to bring me back to neutral, plus some tweaks gives the final look!
There was also a backlight with two Rust gels on it to make it slightly warmer than the neutral key light even after correction, I wanted this warmer light to contrast the purple and give me separation from the background.
If you’re interested in the camera setup, I was already holding my primary camera and my most used lens (Nikon Z9 & Nikkor Z 70-200 f/2.8), so this was shot with a Nikon Z6 and my favourite lens of all time, a 40 year old Nikkor 400mm f/3.5 AI-S manual focus lens (I love it so much I’m working on a tattoo sleeve of its optical elements arranged as arm bands). This was shot at a slow shutter speed of around 2 seconds, and a small aperture of f/16 to increase the depth of field.
As you’ve made it to the end of this post, you’ve earned a look at all the stupid shots we took, enjoy!